Falling Angels by Barbara Gowdy Page A

their father. She thinks of when they built the fallout shelter together as when she was young and carefree. Then she worked with eight-foot-long two-by-fours. Now she works with pieces from the scrap pile. This is one of their father’s conditions, the other being that whatever she makes has to serve a useful function.
    The first thing she makes is a knick-knack holder. She is finished it and looking for a place to hang it before she realizes that they don’t have knick-knacks (or needlepoint pictures, or plastic fishes on the wall). She ends up hanging it beside her bed to put her glasses and drink of water on at night.
    Next she makes a bread box. Then a jewellery box, then a toolbox. She knows that she isn’t as skillful at carpentry as Sandy is at sewing, but she comes up with good ideas, such as adding hooks to the toolbox so that it can hang on a ladder. In their father’s workroom her brain flowers with so many ideas that she stops dwelling on her funeral.
    One day she discovers an accordion file under the workbench. It’s all dusty and tied up with a long black shoelace. She is reminded of the newspaper cutting that Uncle Eugene hid in his workroom. As she opens the file and takes out what’s inside—a black-and-white photograph—that cutting about their brother, Jimmy, is at the front of her mind, and yet she thinks the photograph is her. In one of the albums there’s a picture of her at six months, and she looks exactly like this: black hair, eyes at a Chinese slant, even wearing the same lace nightgown.
    Why is their father hiding the picture down here? she wonders. Her little baby hands are palms up in a “Who, me?” gesture. Did he get a kick out of that? Maybe he really loved her when she was a baby.
    She turns the picture over. “Jimmy,” she reads out loud,“March second, nineteen forty-eight.”
    She turns the picture back round. “Jimmy Field,” she says softly, formally.
    He could have been her identical twin. When she was born, their mother and father must have wondered if she was him, back from the bottom of Niagara Falls. She looks at the writing. Small, tidy letters. Their mother’s.
    “Poor baby, poor little baby,” she says to the face. Now that she knows it’s Jimmy’s, she thinks it’s darling. “Mommy loved you. Did she ever. When you drowned, she turned to drink.”
    She kisses the picture, slips it back in the file, ties up the shoelace and puts the file where she found it under the bench. For the rest of that afternoon she is aware of the picture at thigh level, like a beam of warm light hitting her, a comfort.
    About a week later she’s standing there at the workbench, and she finds herself saying out loud: “What would you do if you were a girl, and boys mooed at you?” She imagines the answer formulating in Jimmy’s head, beaming out to her thighs and then travelling up through her body to her brain. She imagines a voice like Jesus’: “Pretend you are Daniel in the lion’s den.”
    From that day on she asks Jimmy all of her pressing questions. She spaces them out and restricts them to important issues, feeling that she should show respect. To every question that she asks, she receives an answer that she knows is right. “Why not see what needs repairing around the house?” “Our father is in a great mood these days—ask if you can use some of his good pieces of wood.”
    Suddenly their father is a pal, a big spender. He arrives home with gifts of chocolate bars. He increases their allowance. One Saturday in October he shows up from work at noon, raving about the gorgeous fall colours, and makes them drive with him to the country to see the trees. They haven’t gone on adrive to the country in years, not since their mother stopped leaving the house. For about two hours, without him once complaining about what the pot holes are doing to his shocks, they drive up and down rough roads. He smiles ecstatically, whistles, starts up singsongs. Then he drives back